I was a bit intimidated at first with my club as they seemed to have all these competitions with lots of seemingly unnecessary pointcounting. But I'm starting to like them now, I suppose because they've been very generous with their support and comments regarding my stuff and my realisation that the pointcounting is really just about everyone urging everyone else on. Still not sure about all this arps and lrps obsession, but heyho. Heck we're all into the same thing

Fingers crossed!

John is correct. This is a very easy mistake to make, though, the eye sometimes confuses us.

Ahhhh - that ring flash is great, isn't it! I love it!
Maybe it's just the way the forum displays it, looks kind of blotchy/patchy on my (terrible work) monitor

Nice, maybe a bit oversharpened though? (although in fairness I can't really tell because I can't see a full size original) - what did you use to shoot it?

I was just curious what tips & hints any astro gang members here might be willing to share regarding photographing comet ISON which is due next month & January. Do you really need to go to the back of beyond to get a suitable dark sky?

Thank you

-Johan

Can I (sorry) throw a spanner in the works. On manual cameras you pay for film and development so the cost of learning and the cost of mistakes are both far more then on digital. You might be better off buying a really old digital one first to learn the basics, then move onto manual later. Sorry.

Sad. Nobody wins out of this

So true. Ping me a mail when you're down there, I'm in Surrey not a million miles away. We could, err, go do some rocks and milky water

I don't comment much because I'm afraid it'll come across as rude or offensive. I self-edit my own stuff to a ludicrous degree and reject 99% of my own shots because I'm horribly picky, and I'm just as picky with other people's - in my own mind -. But the thing is it would probably appear as unkind so whilst I look and study and think to myself 'what would I have done differently', I don't put the thoughts on paper for reasons above.

Exceptions are when I see something I really really like - then I'll usually say something. Because it's nice to praise. But in all honesty that's very few photos. Heck I only have 100 favourites on Flickr and I bet I've looked at thousands, if not 10s of thousands in my time.

One thing though is that you can't always expect comments, because if there's always comments about every photo then those comments become pretty meaningless. Sometimes in critique nights I ask myself what was the point of this critique because all they do is describe the picture for 2 minutes but don't actually say much else. Which isn't that useful I personally think. So rather than a lot of comments I'd prefer fewer but comments that actually say something useful.

We have this same discussion over at another forum where I judge some stuff and people say 'why don't they make more comments when judging'. Well the truth is there's not always a useful comment to be made, and rather than saying something just for the sake of it I often prefer to say nothing. More signal, less noise.